


Isolde

by eudaimon



Series: Our Lives Apart [17]
Category: Arthurian Mythology, Original Work
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:35:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>A princess of Ireland. Beloved of Tristan. Married to somebody else.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Isolde

**Author's Note:**

> A princess of Ireland. Beloved of Tristan. Married to somebody else.

There was a face frozen in the ice, a young boy or girl. She couldn’t tell. In Ireland, in the country where she sprang from, they still told stories about a girl washing bloody shirts, a given glimpse of your own death. She hadn’t seen any skinny girls, their knuckles blue from trying to get the stains out of skirts, but she stood and stared at the face in the ice for a long time, the little distorted features beneath the scuffed footprints in the light covering of snow. She tried to make out if her own fate was spelt out there. She couldn’t tell. It had been a long ride to bring her there, tall on her white horse, the road thick with pilgrims in their brown robes and the hedges pale with frost, the heavy fur trimmed edge of her cloak dropping almost to the ground. There had been no sound, the world dampened by the snow, lending a strange funeral hush and she had turned her face into the shadows of her hood and thought of him, conjured him bent low over the neck of his horse and riding hard so that he could be sure to arrive ahead of them, ahead of the Queen and her escort of one hundred of her husband’s most fearsome warriors. When she had heard that they were coming for her, her husband’s men, she’d run through the secret doors to him without her shoes on. He’d caught her in the doorway, and she’d pushed a plan against his parted lips. _Ride quickly_ , she’d told him. _Do this thing and that. Do not fail me if you love me. Do not fail _. It had been so simple, at the time.__

She had sealed it with a crumpled kiss.

“Isolde?”

She started; she’d been staring at the face in the ice. The child had fallen, obviously...fallen with nobody to catch her (she’d decided that the long hair straggling recalled a little girl with hair in braids come undone in the icy cold). She could fall here too, yet. She shook herself. Nobody was going to die here. Nobody ever died for loss of love or honour.

“Isolde,” said the voice, more insistent this time. Her husband’s Captain, broad shouldered and heavily bearded, furred like a bear against the cold. The pilgrims crossed the ice around them, the men clean shaven, the women watery looking, and every one of them chin-less and goose-pimpled.

“Yes, yes…I’m coming,” she said, with a royal wave of her hand, shading her eyes to look for him as she stepped down onto the frozen river, into her own future. Or something. She fell into step with the pilgrims, every one of them shuffling their feet to keep from slipping on the ice. Now there was talking, a faint mutter that grew louder, the closer they came to the edge of the ice and the stone church rising above them. More and more talking, and all of the time she kept looking, kept watching for a scrap of green showing somewhere in all those shit brown robes. He’d promised her that, beneath the Pilgrim’s disguise, he’d wear his own colours, so that she’d know him even if she couldn’t see his face. She was sure that she would know him anyway. 

She’d given herself to him so entirely.

*

He had come in a ship with dark sails with a message from Mark of Kernow, and a tithe to be paid, to begin with. Isolde had been almost too old to be married, too beautiful for most men, too carefully guarded a prize and then the Knight had come to claim her for his King. For centuries, the King of Ireland had been sending his eldest daughter to Kernow as the price paid for continued peace. She was the only child of her parents. She had a host of child-aged Uncles, but she was the only daughter, and so she was the only one who could be sent. 

Nobody had asked her what she thought. She’d been in her chamber, combing her fingers through her long hair when Morholt, her father’s next oldest brother and still younger than her by three years had come to the door. He was her favourite, handsome with an open sort of face, the kind of face that showed when he was even thinking about lying. His hair was perpetually tousled. He always blushed when she leaned up to kiss his forehead.

“You have to come now, Isolde,” he said quietly, leaning one shoulder against the jamb. “He’s here.”

Sitting, she’d drawn herself up to her full height.

“What if I don’t want to come? Will my Da come and fetch me himself? Is that it?”

Morholt had smiled and shook his head.

“I’m to bring you whether you like it or not,” he said. This time, it was him who leaned in and down to smooth her hair and kiss her forehead. “You’re not the first woman to do this, Isolde. And I hear that Kernow’s a beautiful place. Nearly as beautiful as Eire.”

“Is that supposed to be comforting?” she asked him, and then she reached and took his hand in hers.   
“Come on then,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”

It was only her life, after all.

Outside in the courtyard, already bought and sold, she’d stood and watched. For a long time, she had wondered if it would rain on the day that they came to fetch her. The clouds scudded across the flat, white sky, as she watched Mark’s knight from across the water leaning on his sword on his knee in the mud, head bent. Morholt stood over him, sword raised. It didn’t happen very often but, every once in a great while, the Champion beat the visitor and the Princess stayed at home. The legends told them this, but there was nobody alive who could ever remember seeing it happen. The Kings of Kernow always sent their best to claim.

What the legends didn’t say was how fast the knight would move, with his head still bent, and how being so low down would give him the leverage to shove his sword up through Morholt’s ribs, and how red the heart-blood would be on the inches of steel that poked out of Morholt’s mail. The legends gave no time at all to how easily a man might die from a calculated blow delivered after a clever feint. Isolde had stood and stared as Tristan pulled his sword free and stood up as Morholt crumpled to the ground, dead. It wasn’t a hero’s death. It was a death that changed nothing; Tristan wiped his sword on the grass and Isolde was still going to Kernow. She had prayed for rain, then, wanted Eire herself to rise up in mourning for handsome Morholt. She wanted the Goddess to send the rain in hard from the sea and drown Tristan of Kernow where he stood. Morholt was dead, and so she, and so she wa, had wanted the knight dead as well. It would only have been fair.

But it hadn't happened, because life is hardly ever fair.

“Come on, Isolde,” said Brangwain, maid and childhood friend both, taking her gently by the elbow, guiding her away as the men bent and lifted Morholt up to the level of their shoulders while Tristan stood with his hands hanging loosely at his sides and watched. 

Back in her chamber, she’d stood numbly while Brangwain stripped her of her mudstained gown and brushed out her long hair.

“What colour do you want?” she asked her.

“White,” said Isolde. “White for Morholt.”

White for all of her losses, and everything that she still stood to lose that day.

*

With the wind blowing and pulling at the long strands of her hair, fanning it out behind her, Isolde waited to kiss her mother goodbye and to bid honour to her father. Behind her, on his ship, Tristan was waiting for her, leaning on his arms on the rail, his shirt stained green from the field. It hadn’t been an easy fight for him. He stood in the sun and she could imagine the smell of him, leather, and the sweat in his darkly curling hair, grass and blood. When she imagined him touching her by accident, his fingers brushing her arm to steady her as she climbed aboard the ship, her stomach heaved uneasily. She was pure, a princess of Ireland in her white gown. They had called her the Fair and she’d waited years for a husband who wasn’t afraid of her. They said that she could heal the sick. They said that she was worth her weight in iron, which is heavier and of more use than gold. She’d been sold like so much meat to this curly haired knight who was younger than her. The price he’d paid for her had been blood and violence, which told her all that she needed to know about men, if she hadn’t known already from watching her father and his brothers. She risked a glance back at him. He smiled and winked at her, still leaning on his arms. She turned back to her mother and held out her hands.

She didn’t look at him again.

*

If her life had ended with Morholt and the sight of Tristan standing on the sunny deck, then Hell was the space below the decks, in the dark, where the world pitched and rocked and Brangwain, sweetheart, her childhood friend whom she’d grown up with and brought with her when she left, cried and whimpered about the country that they were never going to see again. With Brangwain’s cheek against her thigh, Brangwain’s tears soaking through her white skirts and her fingers combing through Brangwain’s long, pale hair (so like her own), Isolde had closed her eyes and thought of a new world. Around them the ship had creaked and shuddered as though possessed, and Isolde’s entire life narrowed to planks and pitch and the rocking, rolling motion of the sea, to the curls of Brangwain’s hair around her fingers and the bind of white linen across her breasts.

“Shhhh,” she murmured, smoothing her friend’s hot, wet cheeks. She kept herself occupied by imagining each part of her body as separate and then turning them against him, one by one. When she was done, she hummed Irish lullabies and started on Brangwain’s body. She turned each part of them against him. She hardened both of their hearts and told herself that maybe she could learn to love a King but she could never even look at the Knight who killed her without leaving a mark. She entertained fantasies of killing him while he slept. Her Uncles had taught her some things, but her mother had taught her more. She wouldn’t mis-aim, she was sure of it. After Brangwain fell asleep, Isolde kilted up her skirts around her knees and followed the corridor down into the spiralling heart of the tiny ship, hiding from the shouts of the crew men on the deck above. He hadn’t even closed the door of his cabin all of the way.

Through the crack in the door, she watched him shrug out his clothes. She watched as his shoulders tensed as he dragged his shirt up over his head. Underneath the green, he was brown and white. Scars. Too many scars. For a moment, the beauty of the lines across his back made something low in her belly contract for him, but she closed her eyes, pinched a breath out through her nose. 

She was hardening her heart.

He’d left his sword lying on a pile of clothes, unsheathed; he’d been examining the notched blade, his sword heavy and knotched, no grace. He lay in a wooden tub, steam rising, his head tipped back against the rim. He looked much younger with his hair slicked back. He looked like he’d barely lost his puppy fat, his face only recently gone lean and handsome. She thought of her youngest uncle, five years old, more of a brother to her than anything, and how he used to lie with his cheek against her thigh, dreaming of bows and arrows. He looked almost fragile lying there, the water beading on his skin, catching against his scars. She picked up the sword and hefted it. He wasn’t a child. She’d seen him with blood on his hands. The sword was heavier than she thought it would be. She imagined being hit with it, propelled by the full weight of his body behind it. He didn’t look like much, but….

He’d moved so quickly, pushing up from his knee. She hoped that it had been too sudden for Morholt to feel much of it at all.

She realised that he was looking at her. Somewhere inside her, there was a trembling little girl screaming but Isolde, grown, with her hard heart, lifted her chin to meet his gaze, leaning her weight downwards on the point of his sword.

“I could kill you,” she said. “I should kill you. You…I loved him.”  
“I’ve got a name,” he said. She lifted the sword with both hands, walked towards him with it held out in front of her, trembling, until she was close enough to stand over him. With some effort, she guided the point of the sword to rest against his throat. He didn’t stop looking at her.

“I know your name. I know who you are. I loved him and you killed him.”  
“I was challenged,” he said. “What else was I supposed to do?”

“Is that all you do? Like a trained dog? Your master says kill so you go kill, and drag the bloody spoils back home? What does your wife say?”  
“I haven’t got a wife.”   
“That’s sad,” she said, pressing on the sword a little, so she could feel his breath bobbing against it. “If I killed you, right now, who’d remember you? Anybody?”  
“The world remembers deeds, Isolde. I’ve done. I’ve done what was required of me. S’not me who’ll be forgotten…s’you and your ladies and your uncle who did nothing but wait.”

Her name. He’d said her name for the first time. She’d assumed that he didn’t know or didn't care, but he’d looked at her and said it. She dropped the sword. It bounced with a terrible noise when it hit the side of the tub and fell against the floor. Running, her bare feet made no sound on the wooden boards.

*

He woke her, fumbling in the dark. She’d lay awake listening to him roaming on the deck, her arm around Brangwain’s waist, holding the other girl's slim heat against her. In the sudden flare and then the dim spill of the light she saw him, blowing on his burnt fingers. She sat up, Brangwain snoring softly still.

“Isolde,” he said, with a quick nod of his head, turning away from her, back to the door, heading for his own bed.   
“I would have killed you, Kni-“  
“My name’s Tristan.”  
“I would have killed you, Tristan.”

He looked at her for a long time, too long, so long a time that it became uncomfortable, and then he nodded.

“Do you want to come and sit with me, Isolde? Have something to drink? It might help you sleep.”

She’d clambered out from beside Brangwain, too eager, even then, gathering unbleached linen around her thighs. Later, people would talk of love potions and powder heavy wine. Later, they’d whisper of witchcraft and foul play, trickery and deception, some kind of Irish spell. What Isolde knew was this: when his lips touched hers, she tasted his breath. What she knew was that, when he held out his hand to her, she took it, and one side of her skirt touched the bone of her ankle. They knew each other’s names. She let him bring her out onto the deck. She shivered and he wrapped his arm around her shoulders, pulled back against his solid heat. She let him because it felt better than being alone. It wasn't anything to be proud of. It was just something that had happened. It wasn't as if she'd planned it that way, lain in the bed beside Brangwain and plotted. She liked to think that she understood a little about men; how some pushed and some pulled and some drifted. He was drifting. She saw it in his face. She didn't love him, she couldn't, but she did feel sorry for him, like a blue edge to the heat of her anger. She hated him, but she could no longer hate him out of existence. It was a stutter, when she took his face in her hands. It was a stammer, when she kissed him. He tried to whisper to her but he couldn't find the words. She rubbed her fingers against his lips. White was for mourning, not purity. Pure something. Want. Need. She wanted him to help her. She needed him to know her. He was the last person who'd seen her, before she changed entirely. She pressed her body tight against his and hoped to leave an impression. She had wanted to hate him, but something else had come instead.

She woke up in pieces, her hands first (one threaded through his curling hair, one smoothing the flat heat of his belly). Her nose then, which brought her the warm, close smell of him. He smelt exactly like she’d imagined, except not her own scent mingled with his, left on his fingers and his mouth and the flat of his belly. His bones were arranged around her like a blessing. His body, notched with scars, reminded her of his sword. She'd wanted to kill him the night before but now she stretched carefully, not wanting to wake him. It would be morning soon anyway, and Kernow would come looming out of the mist, and she'd rise and braid her hair with herbs and water and make herself ready for her husband. 

Lonely without him, she kissed his forehead. She wanted to wake him. He opened his eyes. She rubbed his lips with her fingers, don't speak, not yet, don't ruin it. He lay silently and watched her as she bent naked over her chest and rummaged for a gown that wasn't mourning white. In the pitching, rolling light, the indigo linen looked closer to black, closer to the colour of his eyes than hers. He lay on his back on the pallet, one arm pillowed behind his head and watched as she sat taken, soft curves and muffled lines, and combed her fingers through her nearly waist length hair. 

"So now you'll go and be a wife?" he said, finally. "Somebody else's wife."

"Yes," she said. "I suppose so."  
"You could stay. We could...go. This is my ship. We could go anywhere."

Anywhere there was water, anyway. The sea had always seemed so terrifyingly big from the beach, mirroring the sky. She shook her head without looking at him.

"No, Tristan. Not now."  
"I wish...."

He was so young, wasn't he?

"If wishes were horses, lover, I'd be the Queen of Ireland, and I'd never have met you, and I'd have a hundred thousand horses."

She turned her back on him to step into her gown, and didn't look at him after that.

*

King Mark of Kernow was handsome, though Isolde wondered how much of that was because of the kind light in his eyes, the nice line of his mouth. Flowers in her hair and shared wine from a golden cup. Brangwain's hand on her arm when she thought that might fall and there she was, a wife. Married. She'd almost wanted it to rain, wanted the sky flat and grey and featureless, imagined Tintagel washing away into the sea in a deluge, but it hadn't and it didn't and the sun shone all day and the ladies danced and she sat at her husband's right hand. Her husband.

And all day, Tristan there, not smiling, in the corner of her eye.

Later, in the dim light, always in the dim light, Isolde unbraided Brangwain's long hair, the comb bone as she separated layers over her maid's finely trembling shoulders. They could have been sisters, the two girls; known each other for so long that they'd started to look alike, tall and slim with long hair and the bind of white linen across their breasts. They had called her the Fair, Isolde, the Princess of Ireland and there she was, a wife, a ruin, and Brangwain was her only hope. Soon be expected in her husband's bed, but not until full dark. In a fire, she'd have kicked a hole in anything to let the smoke out, to let her out. Brangwain was a hole which she smashed with her fist in the red and orange sky. 

A sunset wouldn't save her. Not only a sunset.

She stood back and studied Brangwain who stood against the window, her hair and loose and long, her hands beautiful but trembling. Against the light, she was so much dark space, the shape of her, rather than her actual details. Isolde took her face in her hands and kissed her.

"Will it hurt?" said Brangwain, and Isolde smoothed her hair with the sides of her fingers, remembering Tristan in the pitching, rolling dark and Morholt before him, pain and a little blood, her heard folded away small and offered with an open mouth and taken so gently. Hearts had layers like onions, like carefully packed chests. In the warm light of the setting sun, thinking about hearts and giving and taking, Isolde pressed a kiss to the corner of Brangwain's mouth, trembling lips to trembling lips.

"A little," she said, "But not too much."  
"What do I have to do?"  
"Go to his bed," said Isolde, managing a smile. "He'll show you the way. It's natural. It'll be alright."

Later still, years later, after the ice, in the face of fire, she thought that it was that, sending Brangwain into Mark's bed in her stead, was probably the first thing that she did that condemned her to burn. Or to dream of burning, and black sails. She managed to put that out of her mind when she went to him where he was waiting, open arms and the look in his eyes. She was another man's wife, the wife of his Uncle, the wife of a King but she came to him barefooted like a peasant, like a lover, her long hair brushed out on her shoulders. Her body was a mirror. When he bent his head to kiss her, she thought of Brangwain putting out the candle before Mark could turn around and look into her face.

"Will he miss you?" 

She shook her head.

"Brangwain went. One woman's very similar to another in the dark, I suppose. To a man.”

He didn't have anything to say to that, but she turned in his arms, her gown unravelling in his hands. She wanted to feel like a lover again, not a wife. Wives were women like her mother, who had been beautiful once but had faded, famed now only for her white hands, her light dim and almost gone, like a dead day in winter. Wives were iron, and women were supposed to flow like the wind. She rubbed her fingers against his lips (how easily things became habit).

"Don't," she said, unravelling into his hands.

*

Mark leant towards her, a cup of wine in his hand, the long table in the hall loaded with food.

"Tell me, my love," he said, and she was distracted by a bead of wine the colour of blood clinging to his beard. "Who shall I leave to guard you when I go hunting?"  
"Guard me? In my own home?"  
"Too precious a jewel to be left in a wide open chest." He laughed, and she remembered that she didn't hate him, quite. "Who?"

She couldn't help it; she looked to where Tristan was sitting beside the fireplace. He was laughing loudly at something. He made a lot of noise, a lot of light, and drew the eye.

"Tristan," she said. She had heard the whispers, of course she had: the Queen and the King's nephew, Mark's wife and his loyal servant, tristanandisolde, their names run together by suspicion. She'd heard them and Mark had surely heard them too but in scarlet, with her hair braided with gold, she felt like whispers, mere whispers, could never touch her. She was invincible. She was bigger than those tattling fish-wives. She was pushing against the sky with both hands.

"Tristan," she said, again.  
"Tristan," Mark said, and nodded.

She wasn't entirely sure when it had happened; when Mark had started fucking Brangwain by candlelight, in daylight, in all lights, her hair dragged back so that he could see her face. It wasn't her place to ask; he was her husband. Still, it meant that there were certain things that Brangwain knew because she'd been told, because sometimes Mark talked more easily when he was falling asleep. She didn't blame Brangwain...it was as though she'd pushed her onto the path after turning her three times to confuse her. Isolde couldn't blame her, that she'd found a way to Mark regardless. And they had been friends for so long.

"Isolde," she hissed, and Isolde bent her head to listen. "It's a trap. He'll kill you."

Isolde felt a tilt come to her chin. She was a princess of Ireland, for the love of the gods. She was no weak and mortal woman.

"I am not afraid of him, I..."  
"He'll kill Tristan too."

She hadn't run to him, then. She'd taken a deep breath, to feel linen tight across her breasts, the weight of the embroidery on her skirts. She hadn't felt the sky any more, but she was still strong. She hadn't seen him the whole night and, in the morning, she went to Mark, every inch his queen in her red and gold and told him that Tristan had displeased her, that he always displeased her, and that the cold wet moor could have him, and good luck with the fox or the stag or the sea. But she wasn't immortal any more. And that was the difference wasn't it? She could die now, one way or another, by cold hand or cruel tongue. She could die, but she wouldn't. She was a Queen of Kernow, and a princess of Ireland, and she was not afraid, but maybe she went to him less.

And still, the whispers came and, more and more, Mark was listening. And he had to do something, to appear still strong. It was vital, beyond important, to appear still strong.

"I have to test you, Isolde," he said, his hands hurting the sides of her face where he held her. "I have to show everyone that you are my Queen," he said, but what he meant was so many people can't be wrong, can they?  
"Test me, then," she said, spat the words out in all of her righteous fury. "See if I'm lying."

*

And there was a face frozen in the ice. A young boy or girl. She couldn’t tell. She bent down and brushed gloved fingers over the surface. A girl, she thought, a raggy whisper of braids in such a cold grave. She saw a glimpse of her own tomb and shuddered in her warm layers.

"Will you cross, Lady?" Mark’s Captain said, and it was all ceremony because she had to cross; she didn’t have any choices here, and they both knew it. Turning back now would be so big a folly. He was holding out his hand to her, and she had to take it or be damned.

"I will cross," she said, as she stepped out alone.

Crossing the ice, her body cramped; her belly, her feet, the long muscles of her thighs which Tristan had smoothed so expertly with his heavy soldier's hands. She would not slip there though, not yet. She would not give any of her husband's men a chance to catch her, or see her fall and tell Mark about it. She walked without lifting her feet, her hems stirring the snow on the ice, which creaked like a giant's bones beneath her feet. Once there were men who said that the world was made out of giant's bones. The world was a cage of ribs and the delicate parts of hands. _Bear me_ , she told the river, silently. _Bear me safely across_. Around her, the pilgrims were also crossing and, ahead, the island and more bones, the bones of a Christian saint, cracked femurs and a holy skull, in the little grey church on the far side of the ice. She had counted on there being so many of them, enough of them that Tristan could hide himself in plain sight. She searched the corners of her vision for something, anything. His face in shadow. A hem stained green, dark hair against his brow and, when he passed her, the barest whisper of blood and sweat and her own scent. _Do this thing, and that. Do not fail me if you love me. Do not fail._

On the shore, carefully, she stumbled.

"The Lady!" she heard, going quicker than she'd meant to, and then his arms, familiar, a whirl softly to the cold, hard ground. _Do not fail me if you love me. Do not fail_. A broken moment, a fluttering beat of her heart. She realised that she'd been doubting him. She shouldn't have. He was a capable man. His arms were strong. He loved her. She couldn’t see his face under the cowl of his robe, but she knew that it was him.

Her husband's men came running but he was already helping her to her feet, a pilgrim continuing on his way with all of the others, stained green at the hem of his pilgrim's brown. He took her heart with him, on his way on up the hill to see the Saint, as she turned to her husband's men, feet shuffling, thinking again of that face in the ice. He took her heart with him. She could love him more, after that, in all the welter of wanting, knowing that she would never see her heart again

Fresh snow was starting to fall.

In the church, she wore white. She was pure and her heart was far away and getting further. She was in mourning because her husband thought that she could not be trusted. White was the colour of her people’s grief.

"No man has ever touched me; no man held me in his arms since my husband on the day that I wed." She spoke loudly, with her head held high, as though she was not afraid.  
"No man but your husband and the pilgrim?"  
"My husband and the pilgrim." They put the words into her mouth. She let them. She had put the words into their heads, after all. It was all of it her doing.

She watched them heat the iron, and then she might have said a prayer but not to their God, to her old gods, who pressed against her, butting belly and thighs and breasts with small, damp heads, like she had birthed them from her own body. When the iron touched her, skin blistered but she did not feel it. She held his gaze until it broke, until he looked away. They carried the message home to Mark: his Queen had spoken the truth and God had protected her from scalding iron. His Queen would always now bear the scar of his suspicion. His Queen would never have a heart for him now (and who could blame her?).

And so: always, always, let them love you more than you love them.

*

In the weeks that it had taken for the blisters to bubble and break and heal shiny on her arm, they'd carried on as before, more or less. They had no reason not to. They were beyond suspicion. Her faith had saved them. Her faith and her duplicity. That was another mark against her, maybe. Brangwain and the burn scars on her arm. 

When they brought Tristan home from hunting, carrying him at the height of their shoulders, they told her that he was already dead and her legs wouldn't hold her (if he died, her heart went with him; she didn't know where he'd hidden it). Brangwain who was still so loyal (but she had Mark's bed, what did she have to lose?) came running.

"Don't give them reason to doubt you, Isolde. Not now."

"I need my white dress," was all that she could say, dumbly, nervously, over and over. White dress, white, white. White for mourning and void. She was unpacking the gown of white that she'd been wearing on the first morning that she saw him, shaking out the wrinkles when the curtain had been pushed aside. Blood still stained the spot where her hand had hung.

"Lady, you have to come. The King's nephew is dying." 

Dying meant that he wasn't yet dead.

"What can I do?"

"They said that you were a healer, lady."

That had been her, hadn't it? Ireland was so far away, but they had said that about her, hadn't they, way back when she was a child? Maybe that had been her mother? It had been one of the Isoldes anyway, for certain.

She'd kicked off her shoes and kilted her skirts to run faster to his side.

She sat with him for a day and halfway through the night before he started to talk. The dead have their own language which the dying have started to learn. She held her hair back and bent over him and tried to make out the individual words.

She smoothed the sweaty hair back from his brow, the tips of her fingers bitter with the herbs she'd used to dress his wound.

“Shhhh...You must be tired, Tristan. Sleep now. I'll tell you a story.”  
“Isolde,” he mumbled.   
“It's me, my love,” she said. “I'm going to tell you a story. About a Queen of Ireland who had a heart of glass and a thousand horses and could run faster than all of them and no man could ever catch her.”

And the story was about Maebh of Connaught, but it was about her too. Her life that had arrested when she'd seen him standing over Morholt, stained bright green. The way that she'd been caught and lost her horses and her heart of glass

“Don't die, my love,” she said. The blood had turned his green shirt brown like rust and she covered it with her hand. “I'll never find my heart again.”

Mark had come himself to carry her to her bed, wrapped her skirts around her legs like a blanket and lifted her like she was air. Against his shoulder, she had murmured about her lost heart. He had kissed her hair and told her that, always, her heart was in his safe keeping.

Even half asleep, she knew that that wasn't what she'd meant.

*

And, two lonely days later, when he came to her, she lifted the sheets and let him lie beside her. He came to her too soon, winces and forced smiles, blood leaking through linen and onto her clean sheets. She knew that it was too early, but she was glad to see him. He wore her heart on his sleeve or on a silver chain around his neck. Was she glad to see him or her heart? It didn't matter. By then, they were the same thing, more or less.

“I told you to rest,” she said.  
“I had to see you.” She felt him speak rather than heard it; felt the words vibrate between her thighs as she slid across him. Whoever said that sex was a language to be spoken?  
“You'd have lived,” she said, guiding her hands to her breasts. Put it back, put it back, put it back where you found it. He pressed deep inside her, but her heart was nowhere to be seen. She almost forgot that she'd been looking for it.   
She started to move, distracted, for a second by a scratch of scarlet on the bed linen, but he moaned and then she did, and then she closed her eyes.

*

She'd forgotten all about the blood; he'd been so gentle that she'd forgotten that, sometimes, love is like a war. Brangwain had been crying and pulling at her skirts, at Isolde's skirts, with trembling fingers like a child.

“Oh, Isolde, I'm so sorry. I didn't know.”

Isolde had pressed her fingers against Brangwain's lips.

“How could you have known? Darling. Most loved.” Blood will call to blood, Isolde knew that, and when they asked about her monthly courses, Brangwain had told the truth; that they were a week gone, which left blood on her sheets and blood on his and no way to explain. And it couldn't be taken back, not by Brangwain's tears or Tristan running to her after he'd been told. He'd come running and she'd met him in the doorway, blocking his way and when he'd still tried to come in she'd pushed against him, shoved his as hard as she could with both of her hands.

“Don't you dare,” she'd hissed and he'd looked at her with a wound in his eyes that was somehow worse than the break in the smoothness of his side. It was worse because, it was beyond her powers to heal.  
“Isolde, I...”  
“Do you know what they'll do to us, if they find you here, now? Do you know how bad this could be?”

No worse than it was going to be, but still.

“Run!” She'd screamed at him and pushed him, and he'd stumbled away from her like a little boy, but he had left.   
_Do this for me. Do this thing, and that. Do not fail me if you love me. Do not fail._

After he'd gone, she'd sat down in a straight backed chair, smoothed her hair and her skirts and waited for them. She was a Queen of Kernow. She could not be harried or chased or cornered. When she saw how they averted her eyes, she smiled, but she was cold. It took a very brave man to finally lay a hand to her.

Passive, like a wife sometimes is, she let herself be taken away by her husband's men.

She let herself be taken, her heart already hidden far away.  
Hidden, and safe.

*

She was a bird trapped by the span of her own wings, then, beating against the walls of her prison. They stripped her to her shift, left her with unbound hair like a virgin girl, but that wasn't the worst of it. They took away her windows too. She didn't care particularly for the Cornish hills, but the sea and the sky were the same as the ones which touched her island, her Ireland, and she mourned them. Still, they couldn't take the memory of Ireland away from her and she dreamt of it often, of Ireland and horses and of running, not away from something but towards it, something bigger and brighter than the sun.

And, yes, she thought of him often too. Mostly, she thought of him in Ireland, her green far-away land, and she smiled and, in the dark, nobody saw her. Perhaps Mark thought that people would forget all about her, and, in turn, the way that she had dishonoured him? In the dark, she laughed and then, still smiling, the palms of her hands scraped bloody by unforgiving, Cornish stone, she pressed her mouth close to the cracks in the walls and insinuated his name deep into the mortar, and hers as well. Let Tintagel itself weep and call for him and her, if Tintagel would be her grave now.

_Tristan and Isolde_ , she told the castle. _Isolde and Tristan. Mark my words._

*

He should have known that people wouldn't forget her. He should have known the legends outlive their players. He'd meant to burn her, like Arthur had meant to burn Guinevere. He'd meant to blacken her, as she had blackened his name. He'd wanted to make a shooting star out of her, but he'd forgotten how, once before, God had saved her from burning.

*

She was never quite sure how it happened.

_“Do you trust me?”  
“Yes and no. With my life, but you lost my heart.”_

She remembered nothing but the sudden flare of heat. The heat and his voice over it. She must have swooned; the fire was cleansing. Out of fire comes new beginnings and fresh starts. He was her beginning. He had burnt her heart to white ash. Later, in the dark, he'd tell her stories of how he'd rescued her, cut the bindings around her hands and lifted her over the flames (scorching, in the process, the hem of her skirt). His horse was dappled grey and brown, his body was warm but did not burn her, and she curled between the horse's neck and his chest, and she took his stories with a pinch of salt but she believed in heroes anyway.

“Are they following us?” 

He shook his head. Like Arthur before him, Mark had been hoping for things to be taken out of his hands, and the burden put on somebody else's back.

“Will we ever go back?” she murmured, as they rode, as night fell over Tintagel. It was a beautiful place.  
“Maybe in another life,” he said, wheeling the horse into the dark forest.

*

She was already lying down in the nest of blankets that he’d made for them when he drew his sword, the sword that he’d won her with, and held it up to the meagre light. He was standing over her. For a split second, still dreaming, she thought that she'd cheated one death to be delivered straight into the arms of another. He’d come her twice, stolen her once, saved her the other time, and now he was going to be the one who killed her. It was all some elaborate plot: Mark hadn’t really wanted to burn her at the stake, so he’d somehow convinced Tristan to do away with her for him. No worse crime in the world that to be a treacherous Queen. Isolde put up her hands to protect herself, but she didn't beg him not to. If Mark's hate couldn't finish her off, then maybe love could? It was all shades of the same death. She knew what she had done. 

Death did not arrive. Tristan dropped to his knees and laid his notched sword almost reverently between them, on wool on top of moss and fern. She sat up and looked down at it and then, tentatively, she reached out and touched it with he fingertips.

“What are you doing?” she said, rubbing one eye with a fist.

He reached out. She thought that he'd touch her, but he didn't, the tips of his fingers moulding the air over her cheekbone instead.

“Never again, Isolde. I’ll never touch you again.” 

He lay down beside her in the blankets with the sword between them. She wanted him to touch her, wanted him to hold her, love her like he had before, but instead she lay huddled in her winter layers, frozen on her side of a slate coloured sea.

“Why not?”  
“Because sin brought us here,” said Tristan, and turned his back on her. She reached out and fumbled along the straight line of his shoulder, looking for a crack. When she reached his hip, he took her hand in his. So she hadn't lost him completely, which was, in the dark, a flicker of a light. She didn't want to lose him at all, by then, and not just because of her heart.

She turned her face and spat. Curse the Christians and their concept of sin. All she ever wanted to do was to be free to follow her own heart.

When she fell asleep again, Tristan’s fingers curled through hers, the hilt of his sword digging into her breast as she lay on it, she dreamt of her husband. Mark held out a ring to her in the palm of his hand. She lay on her back with Tristan’s hand in hers and looked up at him. Tristan didn’t stir.

“I am no longer your wife,” she said. “That part of me caught fire and died. And you were the one who set the fire, Mark. You did this.”

“And yet you have my wife’s face,” he said, still holding out his hand. “I've come to make you an offer, woman-who-looks-like-my-wife.”  
“You have nothing that I want.”  
“And yet I do.” The ring was made of twisted gold. He smiled and she realised that she couldn't possibly be dreaming; she'd never seen Mark’s face look that way before. She let go of Tristan’s hand and stood up, barefooted in the blankets. She had always been tall for a woman, and she could almost look Mark in the eye.

“Did you think that you could run, Isolde? Did you think your gods would love you?”  
“I didn't think, I....” She loved Tristan more than she loved Mark. That was all.  
“Take the ring or I'll kill him while he's lying on his sword. I won't have him killed. I'll do it myself and I'll do it in front of you so you'll never forget that I tried to be merciful. How hard I tried, my love.” 

She stared at him for a long time. When it fell into her palm, the ring was hot from being held in his closed fist

“The ring is his life, and I give it to you,” said Mark.   
“I'll come back in the morning,” said Isolde, and closed her fingers around her fate, light and wrought in twisted gold.

He stayed asleep for a long time, Tristan did, and Isolde sat awake for the whole night and kept a watch over him. She smoothed the tousled curls over his forehead. For the second time, she was hardening her heart against him. She was making herself cruel enough to leave him. Her wedding ring was back on her finger. Her promise was made.

_Forgive me_ , she said. _Ride far, my love, my glory. Never come back here. Never look back. She leaned down and pressed a kiss to his lips. Remember that queen in Ireland who I said had a heart of glass? I was wrong, love. It was ice, really. Her heart was. It melted clean way._

_Forgive me, my love_ , she said, gathering up her things to go. _Forget me_.

*

She was a wife for many years, after that. She lost her youth to it. She grew no less beautiful but she did grow older, and, if she didn't love Mark, then she didn't hate him either. It wasn't his fault. There was a Queen of Ireland whose heart melted clean away. And Tintagel was a lovely place.

She never loved any man as much as she missed her heart.

Mark came to her one night when they'd been married twenty years, and something was troubling him. She could see it in his face. They’d known each other for long enough by then, shared a bed through enough nights. She shifted her weight to make room for him in her seat. There were thick curtains at the windows against the winter chill coming in off the sea.

“What's wrong?” she asked him.  
“He's dying.” 

She stabbed her finger with a needle, and numbly watched red bloom on the shirt that she'd been stitching.

“Who is?” She didn’t need to ask, but she did, anyway. She looked down at the shirt in her lap and remembered, all of those years before, a splash of Morholt’s blood on Tristan’s shirt, up near the collar.  
“Tristan is,” he said.  
“I...would have thought that you'd have liked that.”

Mark sighed wearily and leaned his head against her shoulder.

“Hasn’t it been a little long for that, Isolde? So long a time to hold a grudge. And, anyway, my sister would never forgive me. He's her only son.”  
“We both betrayed you,” she said, managing to look at him. She slid out of the chair awkwardly (no longer so young) and onto her knees at his feet. She pressed her hands against his thighs, her head tilted back to look up at him. For a moment, the lines on her face and the grey starting to come into her hair didn’t matter; she was twenty years old again, and she knew exactly where her soft, human heart was hidden. “Let me go to him. Let me see if I can help.” 

She held out her hand to Mark, her trembling hand. In her palm rested a twisted gold ring.  
He'd given Tristan's life to her once before.

He looked at her for a long time and then he nodded. He leaned down and kissed her, once, chastely on the lips.

“Go with my blessing, Queen of Kernow,” he said.  
Isolde picked up her skirts and ran down the corridor, calling for Brangwain as she went.

*

Despite Mark’s kindness, she came too late, in the end. He died before she could get there. She stood at the side of the grave and the women wept and wailed, the wind whipping at the hems of their white gowns. They wore white for grief in Breton too. Tristan’s funeral was like a dance, and Isolde didn't quite know the steps. She was older, by then. She hadn't danced in some time. They told her that he had taken his wound during a tournament. A Knight had gone down onto one knee and feinted upwards. A trick so old that Tristan had forgotten it entirely. 

As they pressed the clay into the grave around him, as they laid his notched sword across his chest, Isolde thought of Tristan in his youth, that boy in his green stained shirt, the sun shining in his hair, his arms folded on the rail of the boat. She thought of him on the deck the first time she kissed him. She thought of him that night in the forest, and how she'd wanted nothing better than to be held. She thought about her lost heart.

_If wishes were horses, lover, I'd be the Queen of Ireland and I'd never have met you and I'd have a hundred thousand horses._  
She turned away from him, and....

*

And there was a face in the ice, a young boy or girl. She couldn't tell. She saw her future written in a language of looped pigtails and didn't like it. She saw him dead, and her still married. She saw tragedy, and she saw even Tintagel’s proud towers falling, in time. She would not have her future foretold that way. She squinted ahead of her and thought she made out a flash of green under brown among the pilgrims on the path.

She was a Queen of Kernow, a Princess of Ireland and her heart was solid ice and far away, anyway.  
Hidden, and safe.

She spat and twisted her fingers against evil and then she lifted her skirts and began to make her way across the ice with the other pilgrims, towards the stone church on the hill.


End file.
